Last night the winter solstice coincided with a lunar eclipse. The first response to come out of my mouth when asked if I would stay up to see it was, why bother? A million pictures better than anything I could ever see on my own were sure to pop up the next day, so losing sleep just to say I saw it live seemed, well, pointless. Even so, I set my alarm, and at 2:31 am my cheek was pressed up against a window as I watched history unfold. Of all the emotions to experience, I felt something I haven’t felt for sometime now…

Fear.

The moon, an absolute that I take for granted, was cast in shadow by forces I couldn’t begin to understand. My problems, my neighborhood’s problems, my city’s, the state’s, the world’s, they all disappeared with the sunlight, their insignificance brighter to me in their absence than they ever were out in the open. Moment’s like these, when nature puts me firmly back in my place, remind me of my one and only fear: nonexistence. In the same time that it takes me to write this blog, I will cease to exist. Don’t believe me? Okay. Blink. If that seems familiar, it’s because it’s the first thing I asked you to do in this post. Yet even now, both blinks are a part of your past, no more so than the third time I’ll ask the same of you, even if you haven’t done it yet. The future is the past, we’ve all already slipped into nonexistence.

Us, those who loved us, the very memory of us, gone.

Still, I cling to the now that slips from my grasp, I claw at the present as though I might catch hold of it. If all I have are memories until I become one myself, I’ll be damned if I don’t fill them with as much love, friends, family, cooking, and writing as I can, while I can. So for those of you who missed the eclipse: